Ta-da…here we are!
You Are Not Alone
For you fertility healthcare advocates doing the work of the people, we want to remind you that you are not alone.
It’s an important thing to remember. Because sometimes it feels that way. Whether it’s you flying solo or you’re part of a small grassroots advocacy team, oftentimes you might be the only one out there making phone calls to book meetings with legislators or being asked last minute to testify on behalf of a bill. It feels lonely. But State Strong is here to support and elevate you.
Most fertility and pro-family building policy happens at the state level and this will only become more critical in the years ahead. By aligning advocacy efforts, we ensure that policies reflect real family needs—not political agendas. Together, we push for pro-family policies, fight harmful legislation, and stand up for the fundamental right to build a family. We stand for:
Collaboration – We share knowledge, resources, and strategies to strengthen state-level advocacy.
Access – Everyone deserves the freedom to decide if, when, and how to grow their family.
Resilience – This work is personal, challenging, and ever-evolving. We support each other to stay strong.
If you have not joined us yet, please do. We are actively taking on new members and allies. We’re happy you are here.
State Strong read with interest a recent New York Times article: Trump Seeks to Reverse Declining Birthrate With Incentives for Married Couples.
The piece confirms and foreshadows many of the concerns we've been tracking about the Administration's direction on family policy. Some of the key takeaways we wanted to highlight:
The Administration appears to be testing a new messaging strategy rooted in ideological control, not actual support for families.
The plan is deeply anti-woman — it fails to address the actual barriers to family formation like maternal health care, child care, paid leave, and actual reproductive healthcare needs. It promotes birth without supporting the people giving birth.
The framing leans heavily on “traditional family values,” echoing anti-IVF and anti-surrogacy rhetoric gaining traction in statehouses.
The proposal emphasizes marriage-centered incentives to address declining birthrates, sidelining LGBTQ+ families, single and unmarried parents, and those building families through assisted reproduction.
The article also highlights deep tensions within the White House between the emerging pronatalist agenda and the hardline anti-abortion movement. While both aim to increase birthrates, they often conflict on how — with “pro-life” policies actively undermining access to care.
These potential policies aren't just misguided — they're a direct intrusion into our fundamental rights. By prescribing who should form families and how, the administration is undermining the right to build a family free from government interference. This is not about supporting families — it’s about controlling them.
This article highlights that the Administration is not engaging with the actual fertility and family building community. The proposed plan veers away from what experts and families consistently point to as the real solution to declining birthrates: access to comprehensive fertility care and insurance coverage. Instead of ideological incentives, policymakers should be listening to the voices of everyday Americans who need affordable access to care in order to build their families.
This is a clear signal that federal policy put forth by this administration may soon reflect the exclusionary and contradictory values we've been pushing back on in states. Our unified message — that all families deserve support, no matter how they are formed — is more important than ever.
The solution is simple, require insurance coverage for IVF
Arkansas’s Alternative Facts
Arkansas Just Passed a Dangerous Fertility Bill—Here’s What You Need to Know
“This bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,”
said State Strong’s Stephanie Jones
“We all want families to have the freedom to make decisions about how to build their families and for people to be able to access the health care they need. Everyone deserves the right to have children, or not have children, and build families on their own terms. This bill pretends to increase access to health care, but in reality, this bill attempts to reduce the use of IVF—a proven, effective, widely used, and widely known way to increase the chance of growing a family for people struggling to get or stay pregnant.
This bill seeks to redefine infertility and replace proven, evidence-based reproductive healthcare with so-called “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM). RRM is not recognized by leading medical authorities and lacks scientific validation. It is unregulated, unproven, and dangerous—pushing a model rooted in religious ideology rather than medical science, as even the Heritage Foundation acknowledges.
The bill promotes the false idea that this care isn’t already available to patients while also ignoring men and male infertility. In reality, anyone who has faced infertility knows that attempting to conceive without medical intervention is always the first step—and the types of care described in HB1142 are already covered by insurance and provided by healthcare professionals as part of standard of care practice. This legislation isn’t filling a gap; it’s creating confusion and laying the groundwork to substitute science with ideology.
By promoting RRM, the bill diverts critical resources away from the real care families in Arkansas need. Worse, it pushes patients down a path that may delay access to medically appropriate treatments—potentially reducing their chances of achieving a successful pregnancy.
If the bill’s sponsor were genuinely committed to expanding infertility care, they would prioritize updating Arkansas’s outdated insurance mandate for fertility treatments, which is a well-known and documented barrier to care in the state, instead of forcing insurers to provide coverage for unfounded treatment.
People deserve access to the full range of effective, proven healthcare options to help with infertility so that they are free to make decisions about which options will work best for them.”
Bad bills!
We wanted to put in a few links of some if the bad bills that we think need to get eyeballed.
Florida: If HB 1517 - Civil Liability for the Wrongful Death of an Unborn Child - passes, it would give fetuses the same legal rights as children with no protection for IVF. Read more here. Latest update as of 4/14/25: Passed the House and received by the Senate.
Arkansas: HB 1554, if passed, would increase the reporting requirement and enforcement of regulations tied to fertility treatments including tracking, among other measures, how many embryos are created, how many are destroyed and how and why the decision was made to destroy an embryo. Latest update as of 4/1/25: Withdrawn by author, recommended for study in the interim
Want to share other bad bills we need to be tracking?
Please email StateStrongCoalition@gmail.com